Professor Charles Bosk Wins American Sociological Association’s 2013 Reeder Award

Professor of Sociology Charles L. Bosk has won the 2013 Leo G. Reeder Award from the American Sociological Association. He will receive the award in August at the ASA annual meetings in New York. 

The Reeder Award is given annually for distinguished contribution to medical sociology and recognizes scholarly contributions, “especially a body of work displaying an extended trajectory of productivity that has contributed to theory and research in medical sociology.” The award also acknowledges teaching, mentoring, training, and service to the medical-sociology community.

Bosk is being recognized “as one of the leading sociologists of his generation [who] has produced original, persuasive, and enduring theory and research that have changed the way we sociologists think about issues of professionalization, socialization, mistakes at work, and social problems.”

Bosk holds a secondary chair in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, as well as appointments in the History and Sociology of Science department, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, all at Penn. He has also served as a core faculty member of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars program and RWJF Health and Society Scholars program.

His research areas are medical sociology/professions and professionalization, deviance and social control, and field methods of research. His current projects focus on the ethics of research and on medical mistakes in the guise of patient safety.

Bosk’s first book, Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure, published in 1979, is a seminal work within not only sociology but also medicine and is often required reading for surgical residents.

After receiving a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award for his project “Restarting a Stalled Policy Revolution: Patient Safety, Systems Error, and Professional Responsibility,” Bosk has become an authoritative voice in academic and policy debates about professionalism and patient safety.

He is the author of numerous publications including All God's Mistakes: Genetics Counseling in a Pediatric Hospital, published in 1992. What Would You Do? Juggling Bioethics and Ethnography is his most recent book.